xp_logs | Nathan and Lorna, Saturday morning / Nathan and Jean, Saturday night

Nathan emerges from the hermit-like state brought on by Madelyn's news on Thursday, and knocks on Lorna's door looking for flour. She's been indulging in some intensive baking therapy for her own. They wind up having a long, rambling talk about Paige and Dani, his father, parents in general, their powers, vacations, and odd Wizard of Oz parallels.

All right. So having all these final exams to mark had been a handy excuse to stay holed up in his suite the last couple of days, but if he marked one more history paper that told him that Hitler executed Bismarck, or Sigmund Freud wrote the Communist Manifesto, he was seriously going to kill himself. He'd prowled the suite a bit restlessly, picking up books, tossing them aside, finding out that his attention span wasn't up to a DVD.

The last option had been the kitchen, and while pondering that he'd been almost overcome by the memory of his mother making bread, in the cabin in Alaska. It was one memory, maybe two, of being there in the kitchen while she worked, his father God knows where. It had been just her and him, and she had actually smiled. He had actually felt safe, even knowing that the moment couldn't last.

So he'd decided to make bread. Only there was no flour, and the idea of heading down to the main kitchen where one of the kids could ask him where he'd been since Thursday was not at all attractive. Lorna, he'd thought then. Lorna would have extra flour. And she was just down the hall. Leaving the door to the suite open, he headed down to her door, knocking.

Lorna did indeed have flour; she was up to her elbows in the stuff in fact. The results of her culinary therapy were all over the kitchen and her last clean towel had just been set over a bowl of dough to rise. At the knock, she frowned at her white hands and then shrugged. She wandered over to the door, "Who is it?" An absent gesture unlocked the door.

He heard the door unlock and took it as an invitation. "Just me," Nathan said, opening it and stepping in. "I was going to ask you if..." He paused, his brain processing a) the visual evidence and b) the unmistakable smell of rising dough. Stopping, he raised an eyebrow. "I was going to make bread and was wondering if you had any flour. Please tell me you took it into your own head to make bread and I wasn't leaking or something..."

Lorna smiled, "Come on in. You can borrow or help, whatever." She led him back to the kitchen, "It's not bread, really. It's kolache. More of a breakfast pastry. I haven't made it in a while. But I ran out of pie tins." That somewhat odd comment was explained by the proliferation of pies cooling in various places in the small kitchen. As well as stack of cookies, several cakes, a bundt or two and what may have been baklava.

"Well, shit," was Nathan's half-diffident, half-impressed comment on the array of baked goods. "Maybe I should be blaming you for passing me the urge to bake." He glanced at the towel-covered bowls, then at the sink. "Dishes? I can do dishes. You're kind of getting cluttered here."

"Dishes would be awesome. I hate doing em." Lorna stepped back over to the dough she'd been working with and moved it away from the sink so he'd have some room. "It's always been a bad habit of mine, waiting until I'm done to wash anything."

"You should do them with your powers while you're baking," Nathan said. "Good practice at multitasking. That's what I do." He looked up a bit sheepishly. "Right now I think I'll do them by hand, though," he said, running water into the sink. "The whole point was to find something to do where my brain can turn itself off."

"Soap isn't magnetic and the mixing spoons are plastic," she pointed out. "I might be able to scour the pans if I stuck a safety pin through the sponge but I'd be afraid of scratching them." She shrugged. "There are gloves if you want them."

Nathan blinked. "Good point, ignore me. Ye old brain's a little slow today... blame it on the marking." He turned the hot water up, adding soap. The hot water felt good, he thought. He'd had the oddest feeling of being cold... "So you've been at the baking therapy for a while, from the looks of it." It wasn't really a question.

"I prefer to think of it as keeping busy. Idle hands and all that." Lorna shrugged. "Since about three, I think."

"Mmm. I can sense her, you know. Paige, I mean. Her and Dani both, even from up here." He sighed a little, fishing for the dishcloth. "And no, this isn't me being a whining psi. Just saying."

"I didn't think it was. Christ, I'd hate to be a psion. You people have way too much to deal with. Me, I just have to worry about Forge getting too clever and building something that gives me a headache." She pounded the dough for a minute then asked diffidently, "How are they? Can you tell?"

Nathan hesitated. "... here," he said a bit vaguely, not sure how to put it into words. "It's hard to explain. They're not happy, either of them, but they're not separate from the rest of you. There shouldn't be... distance, between the thoughts of one person and the people around them. When it is, it means they're slipping."

"So does that mean they're better or worse?" That was, at the moment, the entirety of Lorna's hopes. Progress of some sort. Dani had her less worried than Paige, child birth at least was a natural process.

"Better. I think. They're turning in that direction, at least." He gave Lorna a look that was half-apologetic, half-defensive. "I'm not sure, because I don't want to get too close. I'm keeping entirely too much in at the moment and if my shields waver I'm screwed."

She nodded, "Yeah, okay. Sorry." She moved over to the small stove and stirred pot of occasionally bubbling orange paste. "Like I said, I'd hate to be one of you guys for just that reason."

Nathan started washing the dishes. Slowly, but meticulously. "I'm glad I wasn't here for the latest argument about what psis should and shouldn't be doing to cope," he said. "I may be pretty stable powers-wise right now, but I remember what it was like when I wasn't." He put the first pan in the drying rack in the other side of the sink. "It was a little easier for me, even. Because I was so afraid of using my powers to actually make anyone quiet down that I usually just suffered in silence. And occasionally ran off to sleep in the barn."

Lorna shrugged uncomfortably. She'd tried to stay out of the whole mess as much as she could. Had until Hank had started the staff thread and then only made a single comment before leaving. Not that it wasn't certain to have been taken as an overreaction either way and…Lorna returned to the dough and punched it with unnecessary force for a second then dumped it into a metal bowl and sent it to rise on top of the refrigerator and pulled down another. "I can't even imagine."

"Eh, we all have our crosses to bear, I suppose. Although sometimes I wonder just why the big brains like to consider psi a successful mutation." Something hadn't come cleanly out of this pan, and he scrubbed at it doggedly. "Did I ever tell you that my mother was telekinetic?"

Lorna started to pull bits of dough from the new bowl and rolled it neatly before pressing it onto a baking sheet. "No, I didn't know that. Did you find that out from your Mistra files?"

"No. That much I remembered. She used to use it to entertain me, sometimes. When I was very small." Never when his father had been around to see it, of course. "I don't think she could have been very strong, or she would have used it more..." He briefly entertained the image of his mother putting his father through a wall. "Does make me a second-generation mutant, though."

"Do you think it's true? That second generation mutants are stronger than their parents?" Terry was the only example they'd had up til now and she was only half-trained. "You're definitely one of the most powerful mutants I know of."

"I don't know. Based on my own case... maybe. The chances are pretty good we'll have an example of a third-generation mutant in a couple of months, so that should be interesting. Especially given what Moira brings to the gene pool." He set another pan aside. "I have to decide whether or not she'll get to meet her grandfather," he said abruptly.

"I wonder if Dani's baby will be a mutant. Do we know if the gene is recessive or dominant?" Lorna blinked, "Her grandfather? I didn't realise you'd found him. Or were in touch."

"Maddie just told me back on Thursday. The Mistra taskforce found him." Wash, rinse, put the dish in the drying rack. "I've talked to Charles and Alison about it, and Moira over the phone, of course. And Jack. I still haven't decided what I'm doing yet."

Lorna steadily filled the baking sheet with little balls of dough then pressed them into little cups. "What did they think you should do?"

"Whatever I thought I should do. Which was a whole lot of help. Although," he said, making steady headway with the dishes, "I get the sense Moira thinks I should, on the reasoning that I'd always wonder if I didn't." He looked up suddenly, remembering. "Do you wonder? I mean, I know the situation's not the same..."

"Since they told me I was adopted? Yeah, I wonder. But I can't bring myself to ask them because…they're my parents, right? Even if they're not my biological parents. And I don't want them to think that I don't love them." She filled the little depressions with the orange goop. "But I do wonder. And if I had the chance to find out? I don't know. I think I'd take it. Just to know who they were. If I'm like them at all."

Nathan laughed a bit bitterly. "If it was my mother, I'd have been calling Moira to tell her from the plane. But I hope to hell I'm nothing like the old bastard," he said, his voice twisting with something close to raw hate for a moment. "It's almost worth meeting him just to make sure of that, you know."

"What is he like? That you know, I mean. I don't really know anything about your past, really." She bent to put the tray into the oven then got out a couple of plates, "Hungry?"

Nathan hesitated. "Sure," he said. "Just let me finish the last of these." As he washed and dried the last couple of pans, he gave Lorna a brief summary of what he did remember from his years in Alaska, although something kept him from telling her precisely what had happened the night he'd run away. Residual shame, maybe? It was still so hard to talk about it. "... so that would be why I'm not sure about it," he concluded, drying his hands on the tea towel. "I'm terrified of him. Still. Despite the fact that I'm almost forty years old and can more than defend myself."

Lorna sliced into one of the pies--apple, she quickly discovered--and put a generous slice onto one of the plates. Her own slice was much smaller and tempered with uncooked apple slices as well, absently cored while she listened. "We never stop being children when it comes to our parents, do we?" She handed him his plate and a fork. "Even when it's long over."

Nathan went over and sat down. "Jack said something like that to me. About how I got less of a chance than most to grow out of that. I've been trying to keep that in mind." He tried the pie, a slight smile tugging at his lips, despite everything. "This is delicious."

"My mother's recipe. Better with homemade ice cream. I miss Bobby." She sampled her own slice and decided she'd put in a touch too much cinnamon. "It's true though. Hard to deal when you can't grow away from it. Sometimes it's being there that stops it. Sometimes it's being away."

Nathan took another bite of the pie. "Fathers and sons," he mused. "Or mothers and daughters, or any combination of the above. It's a funny theme around here, had you noticed?"

"Parents and children? I don't think it's a theme just around here, Nathan. I'm pretty sure that it's a theme for most of the world." She smiled. "I think you're just more sensitive to it right now, what with Dani being in labor. And your own little girl coming along."

Nathan bit his lip. "Don't tattle on me?" he asked hopefully, looking somewhat abashed. "I keep making that slip. I'm not supposed to know it - I saw it in a vision, and Moira would kill me. She wants to be surprised."

Lorna held up one hand, "Scout's honor."

"You're a good woman, Lorna Dane. And a hell of a cook." Nathan grinned a bit. "So, are you going to take this all downstairs and leave it out for the starving hordes, or what?"

"It's either that or they'll hunt me down and ransack my kitchen like the plague of locusts they are." She looked around, "Not that I have any idea how I'm going to get it all downstairs."

Nathan gave her an innocent look. "Easy enough. And good practice for me." He paused, then sighed a bit ruefully. "And I suppose I should stop hiding in my suite. Moira would so be kicking my ass."

"Yeah but if she was at least she'd be here and not on Muir. So that would be a bonus, right?" Lorna pointed out practically, gesturing with an apple slice. "And if she were here, you'd probably be less inclined to hide because you'd have her."

"Dorothy to my Cowardly Lion?" Nathan joked.

Lorna just nodded, "Sure. Except you know not because I now have the image of Dorothy and the Lion getting married and oh, god, I hate you." She covered her eyes with her hands, forgetting the flour still on them.

"Can't you just see me with a red bow in my hair?"

"I hate you." She lowered her hand and blinked in futile defense against the flour now on her face. "Damn it. This is all your fault." She wiped her hands on her jeans and brushed at her face. "Ack."

"If I wasn't so engrossed in my pie I'd go get a camera. I'm sure Alex would love to keep this picture forever and ever," Nathan teased.

"Haaaaaaate," Lorna repeated, her eyes watering. She succeeded in cleaning off most of it, though her hair was also sporting white streaks now too. "See if I ever give you the fruits of my baking therapy again."

"Hold still," Nathan suggested. When she did, he concentrated, delicately pulling the flour away from her into a hazy white cloud. Her hair rippled as if blown by an invisible breeze, the white streaks disappearing. "Yeah," Nathan said, pleased by the lack of strain, "my TK is definitely back where it should be."

Lorna blinked, "Thanks. That is such a weird feeling. Okay, so you can have more pie if you want. But I still hate you for the mental image." She watched him deposit the flour into the sink, now empty of dishes, "Man, I wish I had that much control."

"Why?" Nathan shook his head at the look Lorna gave him. "That's actually not a rhetorical question. Sure, I can pull nifty tricks like that, but there are definite drawbacks. The habit things have of turning to glass when I lose my temper being one of them. The world around me seems so fragile, sometimes."

"More control would mean better shields. It would mean that Piers wouldn't have gotten a chunk of metal bigger than my hand through his chest." Lorna shrugged, "I don't necessarily need to be more powerful. I can rip the wings off a plane. But I couldn't stop all the metal that was flying around."

"Good point. Just remember that control has its cons, too," Nathan said, seriously. "If there's one thing I've figured out as my TK stabilized, it's that less is more. Everything's connected. I imagine the same is true to some extent with the EM fields."

"Small moves. Yeah, supposedly it's all connected at the base, gravity, EM, nuclear strong and weak forces. I don't know, I can't see the connection myself." Lorna nodded, "Still, it's got to be better to accomplish something with a single well-aimed blow than blasting away with no precision at all."

Nathan snorted. "And there are people like Haroun think we have it so easy just because our mutations happen to be strong and versatile. We just have different challenges, that's all."

"Yeah, I'll bet a solar storm never gave him a migraine." Lorna rolled her eyes. "What's that saying? To whom much is given?"

"Much shall be required." Nathan paused, then smiled a bit. "I don't know. I can live with that, I think."

Lorna smiled back, "Hey, at least we get snazzy black outfits out of the deal." Her voice was wry. Lorna's distaste for the X-uniforms was well known. Even after her modifications she wasn't really happy wearing it.

"Hey, I'm rather fond of the fetish gear," Nathan said quite seriously. "Probably saved my life, back on Youra."

"My favourite part about mine is the way other people look when they try to pick it up if they don't know how I modded it." Lorna stood up, "Want something to drink?"

"Water would be good, thanks." He bit his lip, giving Lorna a thoughtful look. "I might be cleared for very light Danger Room work this week. You feel like resuming our training when I am?"

Lorna nodded, "Absolutely." She brought him back a water bottle and sat down with her glass of milk (doctor's orders, damn them.) "Except not this week. Because see, I have this trip I'm taking. Just payment for a job well done, no big deal."

Nathan grinned. "Well, far be it from me to interfere with someone's just rewards," he said delightedly. "You and Alex are going to have a great time, yes? I want pictures."

"I'll try to remember to take some." She grinned at him then sighed, "I kinda feel bad about leaving, with everything that's going on maybe we should put it off. At least until Paige is doing better."

"We don't know how long she'll be in isolation," Nathan pointed out. "You should go, Lorna. It's been a hard couple of months for you, and you need the break. You'll be better-equipped to help her, the more rested and refreshed you are."

"I know. I keep telling myself the same thing. I still feel bad about it." Lorna shrugged, "But the tickets are bought and the reservation is made and this summer is going to be busy enough. Alex and I need to go to Hawaii to find me an apartment and check out the campus and do all that school stuff."

"Then you'll go and enjoy yourself, and when you get back, you can spend time with Paige if she's out of isolation by then," Nathan said reasonably. "Sounds like a perfectly sensible plan to me."

"Sensible. Me being sensible. You know, Nathan, somewhere, one of my high school teachers is
convinced that hell just froze over."

"That's what happens when you get old," Nathan teased.

"Like you?" Lorna retorted quickly and went to take the kolache out of the oven.

"No, see, I steamrolled past 'old and sensible' right into 'senility'. It's very liberating."

"Cheater."

That night, Nathan's dreaming, and Jean's forgotten her inhibitor. She winds up in his mind, seeing a little bit of Alaska and his father - and his mother. Her appearance shocks him back into lucid dreaming, and they talk about the decision he's trying to make. They leave the Alaska mindscape and return to the Askani's beach, where Nathan gets a little perspective and winds up offering Jean some dream-time training. Since they're both there and all.

The snowstorm was howling around him, but the little boy stumbled onwards doggedly. Every few steps he would fall, going to his knees in the snow, but he dragged himself back up and tottered onwards. He'd stopped shivering a while ago. His gray eyes were dull and hazy, all of his attention turned inwards in a tenuous escape from his current circumstances.

"Nathan!" The voice was barely audible over the wind, but it sounded aggrieved. "Nathan! Where are you, boy?"

Jean shivered, eyes darting about. Well, yes, it was cold, and most of her nightmares were cold when they weren't on fire, but that was where the similarities ended. The lack of a thirty foot wall of water, the absence of the intense pain in her mind, and the voice calling "Nathan" all served to let her know that, wherever she was it wasn't her mind. The voice even gave her a pretty good idea who's it was. She tried to reach out with her mind and find the other telepath, but her control was not nearly good enough. Well, do it the hard way then. Wrapping her arms around herself for warmth she set off across the snow in the direction the voice had come from.

The boy stopped dead, his eyes darting around, looking for... something, somewhere to...

"Nathan!"

Nowhere. Just trees, and he didn't know where he was anyway. His expression stayed numb, but tears snuck out somehow, despite the cold, despite everything, and moving like an automaton he raised a hand to brush them away. Before anyone saw.

"Nathan! Why didn't you answer me, boy?" His father was there, all at once, a towering dark-clad shape scowling down at him. "What, did you get lost?"

"T-Think so." His teeth were chattering.

His father's scowl deepened and the boy saw the blow coming, but didn't try to dodge. It wasn't all that hard, anyway. His father wasn't that angry. "I swear, boy," he growled as the boy staggered a little, almost losing his balance, "you don't have a brain in that head of yours."

Jean crested a hill and was able to make out two figures at the bottom of it, a man and a boy. Her eyes narrowed as she saw the man's hand lift and then strike the child, and she set off down the hill, intent of finding out who this man was and what the hell he thought he was doing.

"Come on," his father growled, grabbing his arm in a bruising grip and hauling him onwards. "You'd have frozen to death, you realize. If I hadn't come out after you."

"Not so c-cold."

His father laughed, a darkly amused sound. "Was that a thank you, Nathan Dayspring?" He shook him by the arm, hard enough to rattle the boy's teeth. "That didn't sound like a thank you to me."

Jean was close enough to hear now, and be heard. The name confirmed her guess as to where she was, but she was a little too incensed at the way he was being treated to process it rationally. "All right, that is enough!" she yelled. "You're hurting him."

There wasn't supposed to be anyone else here. Let alone red-haired women who told his father what to do. Women didn't tell his father what to do. He'd hurt her, the boy thought suddenly, terrified. Like he hurt...

"I'll get back," he said almost desperately to his father, his voice shaking. His father wasn't looking at the woman, at least. He could still protect her. Like he couldn't protect... "I'll find my way. I promise. I'll be good."

Picking up Nathan's thoughts when she was already inside his mind was very easy. Scarily easy. She had no shields of her own, so the line between where he ended and she began was getting very fuzzy. And this would be a bad thing to focus on just now, Jeanie. "Don't worry, Nathan," she told the child. "You don't have to protect me. He can't hurt me, and he can't hurt you now, either."

His father looked at the woman, then down at the boy. Then, in a quick, violent movement, he thrust the boy away, hard enough that he landed in a heap in the snow. "By sunset, Nathan Christopher," he said, in a calm voice. "Or the door stays locked. And if you don't make it by then and I catch you hiding in that shed, you'll be punished."

"I promise," the boy gasped out, trying to catch his breath. "I promise, I will, don't hurt her..."

"Don't hurt her?" His father looked at Jean, gray eyes just like his son's filled with a kind of cool amusement. "She's not even here, Nathan."

Jean's eyes flashed dark with anger. "Leave. Now." It occurred to her, in the part of her mind that wasn't caught up in Nathan's worry and pain and her own anger at this man's treatment of her son, that her control was nearly non-existent and she had no way to protect herself, let along the child-Nathan. But then, the other part of her mind was tapping into the instinctive need to protect this child, the primal, scary instinct. It would really be best if the man took her warning.

"Fine, then," his father said, directing the words to the boy rather than Jean. "You want to prove yourself? Go ahead. Try not to disappoint me this time, Nathan." He gave the boy in the snow a cold smile. "The more often you do that the more I like the idea of taking you out to the middle of the woods and leaving you there."

With that, he turned on his heel and headed away at a brisk pace, back up towards the road. When Jean looked away from him and back at the boy, it was Nathan kneeling there in the snow instead, his expression bleak, yet thoughtful as he watched his father walk away.

Only then did he turn his attention to Jean. "I really thought I'd stopped doing this," he murmured. "Pulling people into my dreams, I mean. Let me guess - you're not wearing your inhibitor tonight?"

"Yes," Jean said, sighing, the man leaving giving her a chance to calm down somewhat. "Took it off after I finished for the evening with Paige to take a shower and must have collapsed straight into bed. I'm not sure I even remember getting to bed, but I don't think I'm sleeping in the shower, so I must have. That was... your father?" she guessed.

"Yeah. That was dear old dad. In a rather good mood, actually." Nathan got up slowly, his eyes locked on hers, and the mindscape rippled around them for a moment, restructuring itself so that Jean found herself somehow shielded, even here inside his mind. "I can't wake us up, but this should help until one of us stirs."

"Oh thank God," Jean muttered as his shields came into being, once more delineating herself from him. "Do you mind if I ask what brought this on?" She nodded in the direction his father had vanished, indicating what she meant.

"I've been trying to decide whether or not to get into contact with him. As of late this week, I have the opportunity, for the first time in twenty-five years." Nathan smiled humorlessly and began to pick his way through the snow, leaving her to follow at her own pace. He felt as though he should apologize, but thank her, too. An element that didn't fit was the easiest way to snap back into lucid dreaming. "Obviously I'm feeling a little ambivalent."

She considered the horizon the man had walked into before turning to follow him. "Understandable, I should think. I guess... Well, the cons of the argument seem fairly evident. What are the pros?"

"Closure, I suppose. Getting my medical history, which might be important for the baby... but that at least is straightforward. Closure?" Nathan looked back over his shoulder at her, then stopped, concentrating, and the mindscape rippled around them much more violently.

When it cleared, they were standing somewhere else. In front of a small log cabin in what seemed to be similar woods. Nathan stared at it fixedly. "As far as I know," he said slowly, "this is where I was born. And yet I remember so little of my childhood. There are huge blank patches, between the most vivid... and awful memories." His voice wavered for a moment, but he made himself go on. "But I lived here for twelve years. Twelve years of my life where there was no Mistra."

Jean nodded slowly, letting him talk if he wanted to. She couldn't imagine what it must have been like for him - a life like this was so beyond her own experiences. She could try to empathize, as she did with the children, but really understanding was more difficult.

"It nags at me. The holes. Because after my telepathy emerged, even if I was never taught how to use it properly, I had the usual perfect memory. But from this time?" He waved a hand at the cabin. "Just... scattered nightmares."

The door to the cabin burst open and his younger self, no more than seven or eight, came running out, pursued by his father, who was swearing sulphurously, his belt in his hands.

"Stop," Nathan said, and the scene froze. He looked away, a mixture of sadness and anger on his face. "I hate this," he said heavily, his eyes going back to his younger self, frozen in mid-fall. "Hate having him in my mind like this."

The thought crossed Jean's mind that abused children tended to lock away the worst of their abuses, bury them in their minds and forget, and if this was what he remembered... "I know," she said. "If you think seeing him," she gestured towards Nathan's father, "will help you with this, then maybe it would be a good idea. You're no longer a child, Nathan, and he can't hurt you anymore."

The mindscape shuddered around, the cabin staying but the snow vanishing. There was a young woman there, washing clothes in a basin and hanging them up on a line to dry. She was slender and dark-haired, no more than eighteen or nineteen, and lovely in a fragile sort of way. There were fading bruises on her face, and she looked worn, worn and sad.

Until she glanced sideways at the small child playing in the grass nearby. Her smile, however hesitant, could have lit up a room.

"Why couldn't it have been her?" Nathan murmured, his eyes locked on his mother.

Jean's heart caught, both for Nathan and for this woman, trapped by this shared past. "Did the task force find out anything about her?"

"She died. Ten years ago. It hurts to think of her living all that time with him, when I remember what he used to..." He stopped, his jaw clenching, and raised a shaking hand to rub at his temple. "Not there," he said. "I don't want to see that again. I hid. I hid when I should have helped her."

"You were a little boy, Nathan. You weren't responsible, no matter what he said." For that was a constant in abuse cases - the abuser always managed to find some way to blame the victims.

"I never knew her name. Not until they found my birth certificate in Mistra's files." Nathan watched as his mother - Esther, he reminded himself - went over to pick him up, smiling at him. "She loved me," he said very softly. "I remember that much. Even if she hadn't really wanted me."

"I'm glad you had that, at least."

"She loved me. And I left her." Nathan closed his eyes, willing the mindscape away. When he opened them again, they were on the Askani's beach, a red-haired, bare-footed form walking down the sand towards them.

"I thought you'd stopped doing this?" Askani asked with some bemusement, nodding at Jean. "Greetings, Jean."

"Evening," Jean replied. "I doubt Nathan is entirely to blame. Tonight was the first night I've forgotten my inhibitor. Visiting your dreams is a far better option than sharing mine with the school, or destroying my room."

"Well, you are welcome." Askani gestured around at the beach, the sky choked with stars and the azure water stretching to an invisible horizon. "Rather more pleasant than some other places here."

Nathan smiled a bit wanly. "Are you telling me my head is not a nice place to visit?"

"I would never say such a thing," Askani said with a perfectly straight face. "Although I'm beginning to notice some changes, Nathan." She pointed in the other direction, at what had been dense forest for nearly a year. "Look up," she said.

There was a hill, Nathan noticed, where there had been no hill before. And more significantly, there was a white house on the hill, like the houses he'd seen on Santorini.

"... okay," he said, staring at it. "That is new."

"I've left it alone," Askani said thoughtfully. "You might want to take a look, though," she went on as she turned away, walking out onto the water.

Nathan raised an eyebrow at Jean. "Want to?"

"After the pictures I've seen? I would love to," Jean said with a little smile.

Nathan closed his eyes for a moment, thinking them up there instead of down here. Mindscapes were odd things, when it came to time and space. They were up there on the veranda in an instant, and Nathan's eyes widened a little at the view.

"Wow," he said quietly. The sea and the stars seemed to stretch out forever. "You know, now I'm wondering what this means. Have I developed more perspective on all of this than I used to have?" He looked sideways at Jean, smiling for the first time since he'd snapped back to lucid dreaming. "This, I could happily have in my mind forever," he said, waving a hand to encompass all of it, and the Askani that lay just beneath the visible surface.

Jean smiled back, taking in the view. "Charles would be the one to ask about meaning," she said, "but I'd say this is perspective. And calm."

Nathan looked back at her, his expression turning very thoughtful for a moment. "If you're all right here," he said, "we might as well make proper use of the time until one of us wakes up. Let the Askani do some, uh, speed teaching."

"Seems reasonable to me. I'm unlikely to wake on my own anytime soon, and this may be the only time I'll have for a while for any real training."

"Askani told me once that she and the others could pack months worth of work into a single night. Oddly enough, I always woke up refreshed." Nathan extended a hand to her. "Ready for another change of scenery?"

"Refreshed would be good," Jean mused, taking his hand. "Let's go."